Bearing the White Man's Burden: Misrecognition and Cultural Difference in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Spring 2006 by Christensen, Timothy

When the illusion of omniscience in the narrative viewpoint is not only disrupted with the very mention of the Caves, but also simultaneously implicated in Adela's desire to "see" a thing that will reveal "the real India," we become aware that this is not a superficial dissonance that can easily be overcome.5 Within the framework of the novel one cannot, for instance, simply discard the viewpoint of the tourist and replace it with the viewpoint of an authentic Indian experience, because authenticity forever recedes before one's advance.

Aziz himself is only part of a chain of objects that promises to reveal some self-apparent truth about India to Adela. Each of these objects, of course, disappoints, but this disappointment only leads Adela to the suspicion that the self-apparent truth about India, which she will experience as a thing within the field of vision, is elsewhere. Thus, her desire to "see" the authentic object follows a metonymic path, as the Indian thing seems always just out of sight. The sense that the final truth is out there somewhere else begins the very moment that we are introduced to Adela, as she gazes through the barred windows of the club during a performance of Cousin Kate. In this scene, the windows of the club seem to both Adela and Mrs. Moore to act as a veil, concealing the real India from their view, although the elder woman "did not take the disappointment as seriously as Miss Quested, for the reason that she was forty years older, and had learned that Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider it appropriate" (25). Adela's desire to see the real India first manifests itself, or first begins to organize her Indian reality on a material level, in the carefully controlled environment of the "Bridge Party"6 at the club, at which actual Indians are presented so that she might scrutinize them for the revelatory physical detail that will present itself to her as the real India, or, to paraphrase the narrator, will give her what she wants (27). When this event fails to satisfy her, club member Cyril Fielding (the liberal school principal whose views are often erroneously conflated with those of Forster) introduces her to Aziz and Godbole at a tea party in his bungalow. This meeting fails to satisfy her for the same reason, it seems, as does the "bridge party" at the club. As the narrator explains in a passage in which the narrative viewpoint is indistinguishable from that of Adela, "European costume had lighted like a leprosy. Few had yielded entirely, but none were untouched" (39). Adela's desire to reduce the essence of India to an object that will present itself to her senses as a self-apparent truth is here exposed as a wish to experience India as pure alterity separate from and outside of herself, "untouched" by her own presence, uninflected by her own desire. Adela's desire for the self-apparent visual truth of India carries her from the bridge party at the club to the tea party at Fielding's; causes her to reject every Indian she actually meets as too Westernized to be the manifestation of this revelatory truth; leads from Aziz to Aziz's cousin Mohammed Latif, who is equally clueless regarding the Caves, to the "local villagers" who would certainly reveal the secret of the Caves (and therefore the secret of India); and ultimately takes Adela to the Marabar Caves themselves (132). Because none of the Indian characters in the novel are represented as having access to the truth about India any more than the English characters or the narrator, any desire to replace the unstable, frequently self-undermining narrative view with the true understanding of India is relentlessly thwarted. There is, finally, no omniscient narrative view of Indian reality.